When electing the president of the United States, you must vote in favor of the president you want. However, instead of coming down to popular vote, the system uses the Electrolar College to decide. The Electroral Vote works in that the people of a certain states votes for their candidate and the majority of people who vote for a certain president give their votes to a slate of voters. What this means is that the popular vote within a state wins the electoral votes of the electors who then vote for the president. Many people dislike this system including myself. I disaprove of this system because it limits representation, permits the disintrest of voters, and reduces a candidates intrest in a state.

One major problem with the Electoral College voting system is that it limits representation of the people. The Electoral COllege votes work so that the population of a state directly effects the amount of votes that states recieves. For example, Wyoming only has about 500,000 voters so it only recieves one electoral college vote. Because there is only one vote for wyoming, the 500,000 voters do not have acurate representation in a vote that has a total of 270 electoral votes. There have also been times in which a president has won the piopular vote but lost the Electoral College vote. This was seen in the 2000 vote of Bush versus Gore when Gore won the popular vote and Bush won the electoral vote.

One might claim that because the amount of electoral votes for a state is based of the population, it is fair. However, I believe that the popular vote is more fair because it expresses the opinion of the majority. In some states, there is a large majority of people running for a single party. This can be observed primarily in Texas where an overwhelming majority of voters are Republican. Therefore, the Republican president wins Texas almost every election period. This can be frustrating for Democrats who live in Texas because they know that their vote does not matter causing them to lose interest in voting in the first place. This is not fair for those people nor is it particularly good to express as an American trait.

As stated before, the larger the population of a states, the more Electoral College votes that state gets. This leads to a small group of "big states" that have such a large amount of votes, they are the target for candidates to try to persuade to vote for them. On the opposite side of the spectrum, most of the other 50 states have a smaller amount of votes and are less of an objective for candidates to acquire. In many states throughout an election preiod (the period in which candidates move to diferent states giving speeches) the candidates never make an appearance in their state at all. This is observed in the 2000 election in which seventeen states did not have the candidate make an appearance at all. This also can lower interest in voting for the president.

The Electoral college voting system is not fair in the way the present system works. The system does not show proper representation of the people, does not promote interest in voting, and causes a candidate to ignore the states in which do not have a large amount of electoral votes. Moving to popular vote will fix all of these problems and will improve the way we vote for our president.    